Samsung applied for a patent on speeding-up charge transfer in bi-directional pinned PD to make it fit for ToF sensors. The patent application US20120175685 is authored by Kim Seong Jin, Han Sang Wook, and, surprise, Albert Theuwissen. There is a number of different pinned PD described that create an internal electric field to speed up photoelectrons transfer to both FD0 and FD1 nodes. Some pixel layouts are shown below:
Once we are at high speed charge transfer pixels, there is another recently published application US20120168609 by Alex Krimsky, Luxima. He proposes to place both transfer gates on the same side of the PD and modulate the PD doping to achieve the speedup:
what credibility does the USPTO still have?
ReplyDeleteplaying with the transfer gate polygons is obvious and why would any such "drawing" be protected?
the alexima stuff surely must have published prior art. The center directed cuts are a direct consequence of Vpin variation with width and are the first thing any engineer comes up with when he's presented the problem statement.
Graded doping for sure is not novel.
@ "what credibility does the USPTO still have?"
DeleteThese are not granted patents yet, only applications. As such, they do not say much about USPTO credibility.